Recent images

You are here

June 2014

The fifth session of the Meeting of the Parties to the Convention on Access to Information, Public Participation in Decision-making and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters (Aarhus Convention), the second session of the Protocol on Pollutant Release and Transfer Registers (Protocol on PRTRs), their joint High-level Segment and associated preparatory meetings will take place in Maastricht at the kind invitation of the Government of the Netherlands. The meeting venue is the Maastricht Exhibition and Conference Centre.

A big step toward answering that question happened Tuesday, with the release of “Risky Business.” Put together by a research team headed up by the likes of former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and billionaire environmental activist Tom Steyer, “Risky Business” is a sweeping analysis of climate change’s economic impacts on the United States, broken down by region and sector. The report came with some dramatic numbers, including hundreds of billions of dollars in possible coastal damage, looming drops of 50 percent or more to crop production, and a quadrupling of extreme heat days by the end of the century.

Damages from storms, flooding, and heat waves are already costing local economies billions of dollars—we saw that firsthand in New York City with Hurricane Sandy. With the oceans rising and the climate changing, the Risky Business report details the costs of inaction in ways that are easy to understand in dollars and cents—and impossible to ignore.
— Risky Business Project Co-Chair Michael R. Bloomberg

The G7 Declaration published on June 5th (World Environment Day) by the Leaders of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, the United States, the President of the European Council and the President of the European Commission did cover the issues of the SDGs and CLimate Change.

In my opinion, the greatest scandal of philosophy is that, while all around us the world of nature perishes – and not just the world of nature alone – philosophers continue to talk,sometimes cleverly and sometimes not, about the question of whether the world exists. Karl Popper, Two Faces of Common Sense